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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29255742">Precarity</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/aejrogota/pseuds/aejrogota'>aejrogota</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Allegory, Angst, Description-driven, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hope, Introspection, Midgar, Short One Shot, before canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 12:16:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>832</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29255742</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/aejrogota/pseuds/aejrogota</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A young Aerith discovers flowers growing in a church in Sector 5. In their softness she finds a new reason to hope.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aerith Gainsborough &amp; Ifalna</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Precarity</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozenfountain/gifts">frozenfountain</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I am only familiar with the original FFVII and Crisis Core, so I apologize if I got any lore details wrong!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She had almost missed them.</p><p>Small, yellow, beaming softly in the light; they seemed almost to exude that aura by themselves. They glowed preciously like nothing she had ever seen in the world. Their piddling fragile growths had been hidden behind the pews of an old abandoned church in a far-flung corner of her sector, where somehow they had been miraculously stashed from evil hands.</p><p>A part of the plate no larger than a chair had fallen here an untold time ago. It punctured the roof of the church right above the old chancel, embedding itself into soft loam below its sawn-planked floor. It was noon, now; this normally made no difference to anyone in this place. Yet there the sun stood, imposing, hot and oppressive. It was a column of fire parting a sea of sleepy airborne dusts.</p><p>Aerith had never seen a flower before. She had only heard tales Mom would spin of them in the days before she had moved to the City. There were no florists even atop the plates; the perpetual Mako haze sapped even the freshest of imports well before the reached their would-be consumers. Nothing had bloomed here for as long as anyone she knew could remember. She smiled sadly. In spite of their extraordinary reach, even the Shinra was powerless to dominate something as delicate and frail as a plant.</p><p>This church, Aerith had been told, was built in the days before the plate. It had been raised before Midgar was Midgar, when the anonymous sectors were well-lived sunbright towns of their own. These flowers bloomed from ancient soils long since entombed beneath the endless city sprawl; they sprouted from long-forgotten loams which had been externalized in Shinra’s crusade. These flowers lived not amidst quickening streams or firefly-painted meadows, the untouched nature, the fantastical myths. No, they were real, in spite of the great Contamination. They were real, amidst the ruins of a society that had strained in its utmost to overpave them. The flowers themselves were barely alive. Yet, in spite of everything, they were <em>here</em>.   </p><p>Aerith reached for the materia in her necklace and absent-mindedly rolled it between her fingers, taken aback in dumb wonder. It had been a strange serendipity that had carried her to this place on this day. She had dared not to venture down this alleyway before; at the path’s far end were the gates at the edge of her world. The province where Midgar’s slums peeked out to meet the heavens. Even here, well under the plate, the sky’s blue-green flue-screened Mako haze crept into her sight; it blanched Midgar’s hardest edges with its cold and stale milieu. The sticky air carried that haze with a train of tortured hums and whispers; they wormed into her mind like lightplays through warm clouded water. It was an insomnia, and it grew louder and taller, ever louder and taller, the brighter that glow became.</p><p>It had always unnerved Aerith; she didn’t like the City’s open sky. There was always something more for it to grieve, something more in it for her to bear. Something about the exchange had always felt like the worst kind of taunt. But for the first time in her life it felt like those voices were not dreamless.</p><p>Instead, here, before these flowers, they sweetly aligned into the first choir to have illuminated the church in ages.</p><p>The array of her harmonies converged onto a single melody of a near-likeness to Aerith’s own cadence and voice. At least, in some sense, it did; her voices took no auditory form. Instead, her words swirled and curled in Aerith’s mind in violet eddies; they ebbed in ethereal crescent pulses. The forms of the words themselves were utterly unknown to Aerith, even as the gists of their meanings settled into her Self like the ash-sweeps along the underplate’s earthen alley roads. They were unknown to Aerith even as their forms played dimly along her tongue, played across generations, the unknown colors and the untold flavors, the dying edge of the deepest memories.</p><p>Aerith strained to hear the heart behind that mask. But she was sealed away from her in all the ways that it mattered. No matter how hard she blinked she could not squint through that myopic glaze. It made her want to cry; her most familiar Self lived on the other side of a thick dark ice, a looming leviathan dancing jubilantly beyond the edge of her eye’s definition. She hummed in communion with countries beyond her compulsion even as their choral streams left her behind in their rapture.</p><p>But her voice was firm, and it steadied Aerith’s mind and heart as only she could. And Aerith knew, and the flowers knew. And their separation would not be without end.</p><p>Aerith stooped down to her knees, careful not to step on the flowers – her sacred flowers – and spared a moment to dry her tears. She caressed one’s petals between her fingers.</p><p>“We’ll find each other again.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>It is almost Chinese New Year; this work was inspired by "Mushroom at the End of the World" by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and "Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan, and the shared beats of our heritages as the assimilated children of immigrants to the United States. The politics of the former influenced this work as well.</p><p>This fic was also written as a response to emotive and thematic elements from “You Grow The Flowers Yourself”, an Elmyra-centered fanfiction by AO3 user frozenfountain which I highly recommend. (Thanks for the inspiration!)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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